Question

I have the following .

public interface IMyService<T>
   where T: BaseModelType
{
    Process(T input);
}        

public class BaseModelType
{
  ...some property
}

public class SomeClass : BaseModelType
{
   ...some properties
}

public ServiceImpl : IMyService<SomeClass>
{
    ...the properties
}

Then I have a unity container where i register all the implementations of the generic interface. I want to be able to use the unitycontainer’s resolve method to get the interface, then do some work on it. At the time when i want to use the Resolve method i have the type in runtime

 new UnityContainer.Resolve(myTypeVar)

Can I somehow cast this to be

 IMyService<BaseModelType> value = new UnityContainer.Resolve(myTypeVar) //want to cast it here from object.

So that i can call the Process method that the interface defines.

Answer 1

No, because IMyService<SomeClass> does not implement IMyService<BaseModelType>. If you look at the implementation of the Process method:

public void Process(SomeClass input){...}

This clearly assumes that you’re giving it a SomeClass. It should be able to safely access any members of SomeClass. But if you called this method with a BaseModelType as the parameter, that wouldn’t work, would it?

Assuming that you know at runtime that your input argument is going to be of the right type for the given generic IMyService<T> interface, you have two options:

1. Invoke the generic method signature via reflection. A little slow, but effective.

2. Add a non-generic parent interface for IMyService, which takes a BaseModelType. In your service implementations, you can implement this method by casting the input to the expected type for that implementation. This requires more code. But you could alleviate that somewhat by having a generic abstract base class that implements this method so the other implementations don’t have to.

   void Main()
   {
       var s = (IMyService)new ServiceImpl();
       s.Process(new SomeClass());
   }
   
   public interface IMyService
   {
       void Process(BaseModelType input);
   }
   
   public interface IMyService<in T> : IMyService
      where T: BaseModelType
   {
       void Process(T input);
   }
   
   public class BaseModelType{}
   
   public class SomeClass : BaseModelType{}
   
   public abstract class ServiceBase<T> : IMyService<T>
       where T: BaseModelType
   {
        void IMyService.Process(BaseModelType input)
        {
            Process((T)input);
        }
   
        public abstract void Process(T input);
   }
   
   public class ServiceImpl : ServiceBase<SomeClass>{
       public override void Process(SomeClass input){}
   }